Finally, I wonder if it’s the movies themselves that are the problem (or, more precisely, if it’s our perception of the movie industry). Chris is perhaps the best example out there of a scholar who uses his blog to explore film history, but blogs seem best suited to looking at the contemporary, the immediate, and as a number of non-academic film critics have asserted, there may be reasons to be pessimistic about the current state of the film industry. Richard Brody of The New Yorker is more subtle here than David Denby or David Thompson, who both seem to have concluded that cinema is declining or dead. But there seems to be an on-going and inescapable sentiment that movies have lost their cultural relevance.

"Here is a place we come unprotectedly upon the limitations of criticism by the fact of something that is called personal taste. About It Happened One Night I said that its appreciation depended on a certain acceptance of Claudette Colbert; but my sense of The Awful Truth is that if one is not willing to yield to Irene Dunne's temperament, her talents, her reactions, follwing their detail almost to the loss of one's own identity, one will not know, and will not care, what the film is about. Pauline Kael, for instance, in her Profile of Cary Grant, has this to say about Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth: "though she is often funny, she overdoes the coy gurgles, and that bright toothy smile of hers -- she shows both rows of teeth, prettily held together -- can make one want to slug her." Whatever the causes of this curious response, it disqualifies whatever she has to say as a response to The Awful Truth." [Pursuits of Happiness] [via]

This clock measures the exact unit of time from the moment you step into a movie theater while it’s still daylight outside to the moment you leave the cool darkness into a shadowy evening.

This clock is the weight of water which flows through it.

This clock is the sun passing through the curtain patterned with pinks and greens, smiling lions and guffawing hippos, crisscrossed by leafy forests, and further cut by the bars onto a crib where sadness rages and weeps, getting lost in the fold of blankets and the sweat of midday struggles. The sweat cools, the sadness settles and notices the gaps. It lifts and blinks, stumbling awake to peer through and beyond.

This clock is the amount of kissing one can do before one’s lips are thoroughly chapped.

This clock is the duration of John Keats’ last cough.

This clock refuses to show its face out of shyness.

This is the clock of imagined dragons in sweetlands ruled by children with dirty faces; of low-hanging jerks and funereal theaters hovered over so that all those who did wrong can be witnessed in their woe with glee; of mothers and fathers coming home from long trips, and all the gear for all the dolls, and the disastrous day when all the kickball games have been won, for ends of books and the worries of the day, turning away from the drum and batter of the quotidian and becoming a tossled head sneaking deeper into feathers.

This is one of Dali’s clocks, flaccid and droopy, deciding it has served its time being splashed with domestic lager on frat house walls and printed poorly upon umbrellas and journal covers, and is going off-scene for a ten-dollar Double Corona and some time alone to read a George Simenon paperback.

Garbo is one of the remaining enigmas of Hollywood history: did she love men? Women? Both? Did she turn her back on Hollywood? Did she truly “want to be alone”? Was she a figment of Hollywood’s imagination, the product of light and mirrors, or a woman in control of her own destiny? To me, she is pure cinema: the most exquisite alchemy of light, celluloid, and the human form.

Thurber didn't confine his complaints about the movie to private screenings; he went off about it in public, too. An early pre-release review in Life included this:

James Thurber, a mild man, grows almost profane when he thinks of how his story […] has been corrupted. He calls the result The Public Life of Danny Kaye and is appalled by the star's songs in gibberish, the Dick Tracy plot and the traditional Goldwyn opulence of production. "It began to be bad with the first git-gat-gittle," he says. "If they'd spent one tenth of the money, it would have been 10 times as good."

Finally, I wonder if it’s the movies themselves that are the problem (or, more precisely, if it’s our perception of the movie industry). Chris is perhaps the best example out there of a scholar who uses his blog to explore film history, but blogs seem best suited to looking at the contemporary, the immediate, and as a number of non-academic film critics have asserted, there may be reasons to be pessimistic about the current state of the film industry. Richard Brody of The New Yorker is more subtle here than David Denby or David Thompson, who both seem to have concluded that cinema is declining or dead. But there seems to be an on-going and inescapable sentiment that movies have lost their cultural relevance.

"Here is a place we come unprotectedly upon the limitations of criticism by the fact of something that is called personal taste. About It Happened One Night I said that its appreciation depended on a certain acceptance of Claudette Colbert; but my sense of The Awful Truth is that if one is not willing to yield to Irene Dunne's temperament, her talents, her reactions, follwing their detail almost to the loss of one's own identity, one will not know, and will not care, what the film is about. Pauline Kael, for instance, in her Profile of Cary Grant, has this to say about Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth: "though she is often funny, she overdoes the coy gurgles, and that bright toothy smile of hers -- she shows both rows of teeth, prettily held together -- can make one want to slug her." Whatever the causes of this curious response, it disqualifies whatever she has to say as a response to The Awful Truth." [Pursuits of Happiness] [via]

This clock measures the exact unit of time from the moment you step into a movie theater while it’s still daylight outside to the moment you leave the cool darkness into a shadowy evening.

This clock is the weight of water which flows through it.

This clock is the sun passing through the curtain patterned with pinks and greens, smiling lions and guffawing hippos, crisscrossed by leafy forests, and further cut by the bars onto a crib where sadness rages and weeps, getting lost in the fold of blankets and the sweat of midday struggles. The sweat cools, the sadness settles and notices the gaps. It lifts and blinks, stumbling awake to peer through and beyond.

This clock is the amount of kissing one can do before one’s lips are thoroughly chapped.

This clock is the duration of John Keats’ last cough.

This clock refuses to show its face out of shyness.

This is the clock of imagined dragons in sweetlands ruled by children with dirty faces; of low-hanging jerks and funereal theaters hovered over so that all those who did wrong can be witnessed in their woe with glee; of mothers and fathers coming home from long trips, and all the gear for all the dolls, and the disastrous day when all the kickball games have been won, for ends of books and the worries of the day, turning away from the drum and batter of the quotidian and becoming a tossled head sneaking deeper into feathers.

This is one of Dali’s clocks, flaccid and droopy, deciding it has served its time being splashed with domestic lager on frat house walls and printed poorly upon umbrellas and journal covers, and is going off-scene for a ten-dollar Double Corona and some time alone to read a George Simenon paperback.

Garbo is one of the remaining enigmas of Hollywood history: did she love men? Women? Both? Did she turn her back on Hollywood? Did she truly “want to be alone”? Was she a figment of Hollywood’s imagination, the product of light and mirrors, or a woman in control of her own destiny? To me, she is pure cinema: the most exquisite alchemy of light, celluloid, and the human form.

Thurber didn't confine his complaints about the movie to private screenings; he went off about it in public, too. An early pre-release review in Life included this:

James Thurber, a mild man, grows almost profane when he thinks of how his story […] has been corrupted. He calls the result The Public Life of Danny Kaye and is appalled by the star's songs in gibberish, the Dick Tracy plot and the traditional Goldwyn opulence of production. "It began to be bad with the first git-gat-gittle," he says. "If they'd spent one tenth of the money, it would have been 10 times as good."